Druid at XLDB

by Russell Jurney · September 20, 2013

We recently attended Stanford XLDB and the experience was a blast. Once a year, XLDB invites speakers from different organizations to discuss the challenges of and solutions to dealing with Xtreme (with an X!) data sets. This year, Jeff Dean dropped knowledge bombs about architecting scalable systems, Michael Stonebraker provided inspiring advice about growing open source projects, CERN explained how they found the Higgs Boson, and several organizations spoke about their technology. We definitely recommend checking out the slides from the conference.

We attended XLDB to teach our very first Druid tutorial session. Battling an alarm clock that went off far too early (for engineers anyway) and braving the insanity that is highway 101 morning traffic, most of us almost managed to show up on time for our session.

The focus of our tutorial is to educate people on why we built Druid, how Druid is architected, and how to build applications on top of Druid. The tutorial has several hands-on sections about how to spin up and load data into a Druid cluster. For R enthusiasts out there, there is a section about building an R application for data analysis using Druid. Check out our slides below:

We are constantly trying improve the Druid educational process. In the future, we hope to refine and repeat this talk at other cool conferences.